January 09, 2009

Pixel Bender comes to your Web cam

Rich Tretola has created FotoBooth 2, a free Adobe AIR app that applies Pixel Bender effects on the fly to data coming in from your Web cam. To check it out, make sure you’ve installed AIR 1.5, then download FotoBooth. (Here’s a deeply unflattering screenshot.)

The app idea & features aren’t new–in fact, it’s nearly a clone of Apple’s Photo Booth–but it’s neat to see how the Flash/AIR platform has evoloved. All these fast Pixel Bender effects could be run in Photoshop via the free Pixel Bender plug-in for CS4.

Kuler adds Community Pulse

Explore the Kuler global community with Community Pulse, a big picture view of color usage. This is a beta feature, using data visualization (screenshot) to show the relative popularity of colors across a sampling of countries, time periods, and tags.

To check it out,

Sign in with your Adobe ID to play around with it

Mouse over the histogram to see the hues on the color wheel

Try the granularity slider to see more/less color detail

Use the comparison icon (two circles) to compare/contrast

If you have questions, check out Kuler Help. And don’t forget to check out the Kuler panel in Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and InDesign CS4 (see Window->Extensions->Kuler). Here’s a couple of screenshots, plus a video demo. [Via]